Quarza Inversiones is a Madrid-based evergreen private investment vehicle focused on the middle market, investing exclusively its own capital. Today, Quarza invests in 11 portfolio companies across 6 countries, totaling €150M+ assets under their management.
Quarza brings an institutional PE approach to a family office setting. The firm invests primarily in Spain and across Europe, targeting companies with an EBITDA of €4m or more in most sectors, excluding real estate and infrastructure. Borja Olazábal, Operations Director, is part of the investment team responsible for sourcing, screening, and evaluating potential targets.
Pre-Valu8: Patchy Data and Time-consuming Manual Screening
Before adopting Valu8, Quarza's screening process was cumbersome and fragmented. When the team identified an attractive industry, finding potential targets meant searching Google, chasing down references, and individually querying The Mercantile Registry (Registro Mercantil), which required plugging in a specific company name, downloading its financials, and paying per company accessed. There was no efficient way to filter broadly by segment, region, or financial criteria to surface a list of companies matching Quarza's investment parameters.
The data itself was also unreliable. Quarza evaluated several private market intelligence platforms but found that most pulled from public articles and web sources rather than verified filings. "The main difference between using search engines or LLMs and using Valu8 is the fact that Valu8 is pulling from official sources,” Borja said. “Other platforms didn’t give us precision. They used public sources, articles on the web, and oftentimes the revenues and EBITDAs were not precise. It was misleading information."
The result was a workflow defined by scattered information and manual effort. "We had very patchy data,” Borja said. “And now we have everything centralized in a single platform that’s easy to use."
How Valu8 Unlocked Precise Data and an Intuitive Interface
When evaluating potential solutions, Quarza was looking to check two boxes: reliable data, and a friendly user experience. “We screened several solutions and found a bunch that were good in terms of UX, but they did not have precise data,” Borja said. “That’s what made Valu8 different."
“We used to work with another service provider in the past, but we thought that the value for money was not good enough,” Borja said. “They focused more on North American markets, and their quality of data regarding European markets was not good enough for us.”
The team practically tested each platform, benchmarking against known quantities: "When we tested Valu8, we did it using figures that we already knew: our portfolio companies. The precision of the data was great, and that was differential for us,” Borja explained.
The platform's intuitive design also resonated immediately with Quarza's investment professionals. "Valu8 is very easy to use,” Borja said. “The whole platform is built on a logic that resembles an Excel table. As investing professionals, we are very familiar with this layout: managing tables and using different filters to drill down to what really interests us, whether by revenue, by EBITDA, by region, by market, or by keywords. It's very self-explanatory." Valu8’s user-friendly interface eliminated the learning curve, allowing the team to adopt the tool seamlessly. "Valu8 was the first platform to provide incredibly precise data on companies in an accessible and intuitive platform,” Borja mentioned.
Quarza Slashed Screening Time by 80% with Valu8
With Valu8 integrated into their tech stack, Quarza's screening workflow accelerated dramatically. “The key performance indicator for us is the time consumed in screening, and we've shortened that by over 80%," Borja noted. What once required piecing together information from scattered sources now takes Quarza a fraction of the time. An industry scan that might have consumed days of manual research can be distilled into a targeted shortlist in minutes.
The partnership behind the platform has mattered just as much as the product itself. "Any time we’ve given feedback on the platform, we felt heard, which I think is the most important thing,” Borja said. With Grata's acquisition of Valu8, Quarza sees a path toward consolidating company intelligence and transaction data into a single platform and working toward geographic expansion.
